When Life Hurts, Writing Helps

by Sharon A. Bray, EDD

“We’ll write for twenty minutes,”
the workshop leader said. She passed
a basket around the room, filled with
folded papers, a single line of poetry
printed on each. “Choose one,” she instructed.
“Whatever words you read
will be your prompt.”

I’d come to the workshop after
completing radiation treatment for earlystage
breast cancer two weeks earlier.
Despite an intensive week of writing,
I had avoided any mention of cancer.
To write about it was an admission of
vulnerability. Denial was a comfortable
overcoat, and I had no desire to discard it.

My fingers hovered over the basket.
I reached in, fished out a paper, and read
the words on it: The hospital corridor
was dimly lit. I dutifully opened my notebook
and stared at the blank page. Mixed
emotions bubbled up behind my composed
exterior. I slowly copied the words
onto the page, stalling. Suddenly, the
next sentence formed in my head. Words
pushed and shoved about my brain in
a race for the page. I wrote quickly,
describing the agony of the daily wait
in the radiology department and the
tremor of anxiety as the technician summoned
me for treatment. Ms. Bray? This
way please.

Writing offers a refuge, the safety to express our shock and
confusion and the feelings we find so difficult to say aloud.

The instructor called time. I stopped,
flushed and breathless, but feeling lighter,
as if a weight had been lifted from my
shoulders. In the weeks afterward, I continued
to write, filling one journal, then
another, describing the moment I heard
the “C” word, my fears, the cacophony
of confusing emotions. The fog that had
enveloped me in the preceding weeks
began to clear. I felt more like myself.
When I stumbled across the research on
writing and health a few weeks later,
I smiled. It confirmed what I had experienced.
When life hurts, writing helps.

Writing offers a refuge, the safety to
express our shock and confusion and the
feelings we find so difficult to say aloud.
Translating emotions into words makes
them less overwhelming. We begin to
understand them. Novelist and cancer
survivor Alice Hoffman, in a New York
Times article in 2000, described the importance
of writing during cancer: “What
I was looking for during 10 months of
chemotherapy and radiation was a way
to make sense out of sorrow and loss.”

Alice Hoffman expressed what poets
and novelists have always acknowledged.
Writing is a way of healing. “Give sorrow
words,” William Shakespeare
wrote in Macbeth. “The grief that does
not speak / Whispers the o’er fraught
heart, and bids it break.” Our great
writers also implicitly understood what
research now confirms: the most beneficial
kind of writing tells a story. “When
we begin to see our suffering as a story,”
Anaïs Nin wrote in her famous diaries,
“we are saved.”

Stories are uniquely human. They help
us make sense of life. The myths and
legends told by the ancients as they gathered
around campfires helped them to
make sense of the world, to find reasons
for things they did not understand. So do
our stories of cancer. “Stories,” Anatole
Broyard wrote in Intoxicated by My Illness,
“are antibodies against illness and
pain.” Writing and telling our stories
eases the isolation of cancer and reminds
us we are not alone.

Getting Started

First, find a quiet time to write. Set
a timer for 10 minutes. Write until
the time is up. Here are some prompts
to get you started: ⇒ Begin with, “When the doctor
said, ‘cancer,’ I … ” ⇒ Write about hair – having it and
losing it.⇒ Write a letter to your body. One
cancer survivor I know wrote a
love letter to her missing lung.⇒ Imagine cancer as a character.
Talk back to it.⇒ Write about fear. What keeps
you awake at night?⇒ What are you grateful for?

Through writing, the detrimental effects
of stress, anxiety, and other negative
emotions are
weakened. Writing
stories or
poems out of
your cancer experience
helps
you make sense
of your illness,
find new meaning
in your life,
and reclaim your
voice, which is
sometimes silenced in the wake of a cancer
diagnosis.

Your stories matter. Whether you
write in a journal, on a computer, or on
an online blog, your stories are testimony
to the uniqueness of your life and your
experience. “This is my life,” our stories
say. “This happened to me. This matters.”

Why not give writing a try? It can
help you navigate the rough waters of
cancer treatment and recovery.

Write your way into healing. Write
your way through cancer.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Dr. Sharon Bray is the author
of two books on writing during cancer. Her
blog, WritingThroughCancer.com, features
weekly writing prompts for men and women
living with cancer.